PHILADELPHIA - Just west of the Liberty Bell is the world headquarters of Rohm and Haas, of which the company's Ringwood plant in McHenry County is a small part.

Across the street from the headquarters of the $8.2 billion chemical giant is the courtroom where a U.S. District Court judge began a two-day hearing Thursday on whether to certify a class-action lawsuit linking pollution from the Ringwood plant to brain-cancer cases in McCullom Lake.

Calling the reported cases connected to the 1,000-resident village "a phenomenon that is statistically impossible to calculate," plaintiffs' attorney Aaron Freiwald argued before Judge Gene Pratter that Rohm and Haas should have to pay for medical monitoring and property value relief for village residents.
The lawsuit alleges that air and groundwater contamination since the 1960s from Rohm and Haas and neighboring Modine Manufacturing Co. exposed village residents to carcinogenic vinyl chloride.

"Remarkably for a population of this size, your honor, we have what we believe is the largest example of a brain-cancer cluster we have been able to identify," Freiwald said.

Freiwald filed the class-action lawsuit in April 2006, at the same time that he filed individual damage lawsuits on behalf of three former McCullom Lake next-door neighbors diagnosed with brain cancer within an eight-month span.

Fifteen more brain- and nerve-cancer victims have since filed suit.

After the hearing concludes today, Pratter will rule at a later date whether to certify the class-action lawsuit. If she does, it would proceed to a civil jury trial.

Full Story: http://www.nwherald.com/articles/2008/06/13/news/local/
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